Thursday, May 4, 2017

WHISTLE – James Jones

It took me almost twice as
long to read James Jones's WWII trilogy as it took him to write it. I
was about ten years
late when the first
novel—From Here to
Eternity—came
out, in 1951. Fairly
current when the
second—The Thin
Red Line—arrived,
in 1962 (a year before
I entered
the Army), but for
some probably explainable reasons
when Whistle,
the last one, hit the bookstores in
1978
I hesitated, a hesitation that lasted until a week ago.

Don't worry, the span is too
long for me to remember enough to address all three novels here. In
fact I've just now downloaded From
Here to Eternity,
mainly to revisit Whistle's
four central characters when they were comparative youngsters getting
their start in army life. It doesn't bother me that the names will be
different. Jones had wanted to keep them the same throughout the
three books. He scrapped that plan when he found near the end of
Eternity the story demanded he kill off one of the four characters.
He addressed this problem in an author's note:

Unfortunately the dramatic
structure—I might even say, the spiritual content—of the first
book demanded that [...] be killed in the end of it. The import of
the book would have been emasculated if [...] did not die.

When the smoke cleared, and I
wrote End to From Here to Eternity, the only end it seemed to
me it could have had, there I stood with no [...] character.

Jones explained this was
especially tricky, as he'd had big plans for [...] in the next two
books. His solution was to change the names of all four characters,
which he did for Thin Red Line and again for Whistle.
"But," he wrote, "I
changed them in such a way that a cryptic key, a marked similarity,
continued to exist as a reference point with the old set of names. It
seems like an easy solution now, but it was not at the time."
Jones wrote this note four years before his death of congestive heart
failure. He left about a dozen pages of Whistle
unwritten, but his friend and fellow novelist, Willie Morris,
inherited the manuscript and summarized the remaining scenes based on
conversations with Jones and on Jones's notes. The book was published
the following year.

I
recall this happening—Jones's death and Morris's contribution—and
I remember reading a little about Whistle,
that it concerned the four central characters returning from their
war, wounded both physically and emotionally. I suspect the reviews
mentioned unhappy endings for the four. I've never liked unhappy
endings, probably because I tend to identify closely with fictional
characters. I've matured somewhat in recent years, though, and can
appreciate the occasional bummer if it's handled well in a story. My
literary advisor, Fictionaut's
Kitty Boots, has guided
me artfully in this direction.

I
knew early on—from the story itself--to expect Whistle's
bummer ending, that it was inevitable, but I had no idea how big a
bummer it would be. I'm wondering now if knowing what was coming,
knowing what the story required him to do with these characters of
his he'd lived with most of his life, if that didn't have a bearing
on Jones's cashing in before he had to actually write those scenes.
In her memoir, Lies
My Mother Never Told Me,
Jones's daughter, Kaylie, recounts an incident when her father came
out of his writing room weeping because he'd just killed off a
character. "My father was shaking, his face twisted up, tears
flowing," she said.

Jones
depicted the collective consciousness of the entire unit, Charlie
Company, in Thin Red
Line. This
focus shrinks to the
four central characters in Whistle.
Wounded in the South Pacific, they're shipped Stateside to a military
hospital where they struggle now trying to heal sufficiently either
to return to duty or be discharged. The battles now are fought in
their heads, scarred with horrors and guilt and a deadly cynicism,
torn between acknowledging their human frailty and brandishing their
illusion of manhood. Of the four, Bobby Prell's fight to save his
legs hit me the hardest, as I believe it did his three buddies.

Shot
multiple times in a Japanese ambush that killed two members of his
squad, Prell nonetheless led the remaining men to safety and provided
vital intelligence of an impending enemy attack. His actions saved
countless American lives and led to his commander putting him in for
a Medal of Honor. His first sergeant, however, scoffed at the honor,
claiming Prell had taken an unnecessary risk leading his squad into
the ambush. Yet, when Prell's mutilated legs failed to heal,
threatening his life, it was the sergeant, Winch, using reverse
psychology, who sparked in Prell the will to live, thus allowing the
legs to heal. Prell's other two buddies had given up trying to
encourage him, after he refused to give permission for the legs to be
amputated. Here's Winch:

What
Prell needed was enemies. An enemy, if he was going to fight. He
wasn’t complex enough to fight without an enemy there in front of
him.

“You
reckon they’ll give me a tin cup and some
GI pencils to sell, when they let me out of this?” Prell said from
the bed.

“They’ll
do better than that,” Winch said. “They’ll give you a pension.
And a leather leg. So you can go down to the American Legion on
Saturday nights and show the boys your stump and tell them how you
fought the war in the South Pacific. Just don’t tell them about
your squad.”

“You
son of a bitch,” Prell said. His voice did not increase in tone or
volume, but the timbre of it got taut, vibrant. “I’ll kill you
when I get out of this. That’s a promise. I’ll spend the rest of
my life looking you up, if it takes the rest of my life, and kill
your sharecropping ass.”

“I
don’t think so,” Winch said. “I’ll probably be dead long
before you’re well enough to do anything.” There was probably
more truth in that than he realized when he said it, Winch thought,
and grinned. Oh, well. He would be his enemy. Everybody needed one
enemy.

“At
least, you won’t be going around leading any squads into any death
traps,” he said.

The
Indian eyes of Prell glittered at him from the bed. He didn’t
answer.

5 comments:

I enjoy your reviews of books I'll probably never read, Mathew. Though of course I've heard of James Jones, I've never read him and it's probably too late to begin now even if I wanted to. But thanks to you, I'm now a little bit more well informed about Jones. :)

I agree with Yvette, your reviews are good even if I don't want to read the book. I have not read any of James Jones' books, and I don't know that I will. Although the topic of World War II in fiction is a favorite, I mostly read mysteries. But I might make an exception and try one of these. I was reading that Some Came Running was re-edited and shortened years after publication?